10 Reasons Why You are Never Happy (And How to Get Happy, Fast)
Unless you have a diagnosed mental illness, the answer to “why can’t I be happy” should be fairly obvious. Likely, you are never happy because you spend too much time doing things, interacting with people, and consuming food that makes you feel bad.
It’s as simple as that.
But like many things that are simple, the path to happiness isn’t necessarily easy. So keep reading to understand how to break out of old patterns of unhappiness and build a life that is both fulfilling and fun.
The Answer to “Why Am I Not Happy?” lies in How You Spend Your Time
It is easy to think that happiness is tied to things like wealth, status, or traditional forms of success. This can cause you to spend your time striving for those things. You end up working jobs you hate, searching for happiness in material things, and spending time with people that you think will help you get ahead.
Even if you are able to achieve the status and success you were searching for, you likely still feel empty. Why?
Because you never wanted those things in the first place. And, because on the path to getting them, you spent less and less time with your loved ones, exploring your hobbies, and taking care of your body and mind.
Happiness is about spending as much time as you can doing the things that you like to do. It’s not about striving for a “perfect” life or fitting into what someone else defines as happiness.
So before you dive into the 10 answers to the question “why can’t I be happy?” take a hard look at how you spend your time. Keeping track of what you do each day — and how those activities make you feel — is the easiest way to understand what may be causing your unhappiness. Once you’ve been able to identify what makes you feel down, it’s time to make changes that will allow you to feel the happiness you really desire.
10 Reasons You May Not Be Happy
1. You’re Working Towards a Life You Don’t Really Want
As I just explained, if you feel constantly unhappy, you’re likely spending too much time and energy trying to achieve a life you don’t actually want. For example, you may have been taught that happiness comes from getting married, buying a house, starting a family, and having a high-paying job.
But what if you really love to travel? Or if you don’t want children? Or if you’d rather make less, but have more free time to pursue your hobbies?
If the successful life you’ve been taught to believe in doesn’t feel exciting to you, spending all of your energy trying to achieve it will only make you more and more unhappy. Trying to convince yourself you enjoy something when you really don’t will never create happiness.
How to Get Happy: Instead of accepting what you’ve been taught a happy life looks like, take some time to define it for yourself. Here’s how you can get started understanding your version of happiness.
Imagine your happiest life, then answer these questions…
- How do you spend your time?
- Who do you spend time with?
- How do you make money?
- What do you not spend time doing?
The answers to these questions should help you understand what changes you may need to make in your life.
2. You Spend too Much Time with Toxic People
You should be starting to understand that how you spend your time is at the core of how happy or unhappy you are. This absolutely applies to your social and family life.
Take a look at the social interactions you have each day. Do the coworkers, friends, romantic partners, and family you spend time with make you feel good? Or do they leave you feeling irritated, tired, upset, or even flat-out angry?
Humans are hard-wired to fit in with the people around us by mirroring the behavior and actions of others. This means that negativity, drama, and rudeness are literally contagious. We’ve all caught someone else’s bad mood at some point in our life…but what if you’re catching it all the time?
When we spend time with toxic people, we can adopt their mentality without even realizing it. Your feelings of unhappiness may come from the unhappiness of the social group you find yourself in.
How to Get Happy: The good news is positive, happy, and respectful behavior is also contagious! So figure out how to spend as much time as possible with people that make you feel good.
This may mean having to cut people out of your life and setting strong boundaries with the people you can’t avoid completely. It can be a difficult thing to do — but your health and happiness depend on it.
3. You Hate Your Job
Most of us spend the majority of our time working. So if you spend most of your time at a job you hate, it’s no wonder that you feel unhappy!
Feeling unhappy at work can come from a variety of things. Maybe you like your job duties, but are surrounded by toxic coworkers. Maybe your role doesn’t make use of your talents or challenge you enough. Maybe your work schedule causes you to take too much time away from the people and things that you love. Figure out what about your current job you hate, and then use that information to plan your next step.
How to Get Happy: Find a new job, plain and simple. Don’t spend any more time than you have to at the job that makes you feel terrible. Don’t get caught in the trap of the comfortable and push yourself to leave.
4. You Don’t Get Enough Time Outside
One of the biggest impacts of the coronavirus pandemic is that it pushed many of us to spend more time inside than ever. The consequences of this are huge, and likely not yet fully understood.
What we do know is that not getting enough time outside has a negative impact on our mental and physical health. This is likely because it can cause vitamin D deficiency. Studies show that low levels of vitamin D can be linked to depression in adults as well as sleep disorders (which can also negatively impact your mood).
How to Get Happy: Set a daily goal to spend 10 to 15 minutes outside. This is the amount of time most health professionals agree will allow you to absorb the amount of vitamin D that you need to feel your best. It’s also achievable even if you have a packed schedule.
5. You Haven’t Made Exercise a Priority
No, achieving your “perfect” body won’t make you feel happy. (I hate to break it to you!) But, finding a regular fitness routine that makes you feel good will lift your mood.
You likely already know that exercise causes your brain to release feel-good chemicals like endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin. But recent research shows that low levels of exercise and fitness may actually contribute to feelings of depression. Researchers in the UK discovered that low and medium levels of cardiovascular fitness were associated with higher odds of experiencing depression and anxiety.
This may mean that your lack of regular exercise could actively cause you to feel unhappy. So instead of pushing yourself to exercise in order to lose weight or look a certain way, think about building a fitness routine that supports your brain and your mood.
How to Get Happy: If you don’t have a fitness routine, simply commit to moving your body every day for 15 to 30 minutes. This could look like…
- Dancing for a five-song playlist
- Going on a walk (which could double up as your time spent outside!)
- Stretching
- Chasing your kids
- Playing a sport
This is an easier way to introduce yourself to exercise than trying to use unfamiliar gym equipment. It can help you learn to listen to what your body needs and is a great way to find what exercises feel best for your body and mind.
6. You Don’t Have Enough Free Time
Spending all of your energy on work, errands, and chores and leaving no time for yourself is a recipe for unhappiness.
Even though this may seem fairly obvious, we live in a culture that glorifies productivity and “the hustle” above all else. Leisure time is seen as wasteful and overindulgent, and because of this, it can be hard to even let yourself enjoy what little free time you have. But having unscheduled free time is key to re-igniting happiness and joy in your life.
How to Get Happy: Make sure you are using your free time to do things that fill you up. Because having too much unstructured free time is actually linked to lower feelings of wellbeing.
The good news is that you likely don’t need as much free time as you think you do. Focus on finding 30-minute to 1-hour pockets of free time that you can devote to doing what feels good in the moment.
7. You Have a Negative Mindset
Just like spending time with negative people can make you feel unhappy, so can thinking negatively about your life. If you only focus on what’s going wrong or what you don’t have, it can be very difficult to find a sense of happiness.
Again, this isn’t rocket science. But what many don’t realize is that you don’t have to believe or even act upon your negative thoughts. Instead, you can choose to notice and replace those thoughts with kinder, more positive ones to create a sense of happiness. Choosing positive thoughts in the moment will allow you to focus on the good instead of the bad. This can help you feel happier right away.
How to Get Happy: Creating positive thought patterns is essential to living a happy and successful life. One of the easiest ways to get started busting your negative thoughts is to practice gratitude. This could be as simple as writing down three things you are thankful for at the beginning or end of each day. Over time, you’ll start to pay more attention to those positive moments, and place less weight on negative thoughts when they come up.
8. You Constantly Compare Yourself to Others
One of the most common categories of negative thoughts is comparison. Research shows that those who are caught in constant comparison have lower self-esteem and lower levels of well-being. That shouldn’t be surprising! If you are constantly comparing yourself to others, you stay focused on what you don’t have.
What’s also unsurprising is the role social media can play in this. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow us to share the best parts of our lives. It’s easy to feel down on yourself when your feed is flooded with people achieving the things you want but don’t yet have.
Remember, comparison is the thief of joy. So instead of beating yourself up for not having a life that looks picture-perfect, stay focused on what you do have.
How to Get Happy: One of the best ways to combat comparison is to take a hard look at your social media habits. How do you feel after scrolling? If you find yourself feeling negative or comparing, it may be a good idea to evaluate what content you expose yourself to.
For example, if seeing your ex post about their happy family on Instagram sends you spiraling, it may be a good idea to unfollow or mute their posts. So take some time to clean up who you follow. Keep any account that brings you joy, and unfollow anyone that sparks a negative loop of comparison for you.
9. You’re “Shoulding” Yourself
Another one of the most common avenues of negative thinking is the trap of “should.” It is all too easy to let “should” rule your life. For example, you might feel like you should…
- Workout for two hours a day.
- Always have the latest model car, phone, etc.
- Be married and start a family before you’re 35.
- Stay at your job for at least 5 years.
These “shoulds” can cause unhappiness in a few ways. First, “shoulds” often come from comparing yourself to others. You feel like you should have the life that someone else has, or you should be at the same stage in your career as your peers.
Second, “should” leaves little room for thinking about what you really want to do or what is realistic for you. Do you actually want a family? Do you like your current job enough to stay for 5 years? If your answer to these questions is no, you are likely keeping yourself trapped in situations that you think will make other people happy.
How to Get Happy: Spend 5 to 10 minutes writing down everything that you think you “should” have, do, or want. Then, take some time to think about which ones are actually true for you. Once you get clear on that, it becomes very easy to see the areas of your life where you are spending too much time on a “should” you actually don’t want to do. Shifting that time to use towards something else will make you feel happier.
10. You Eat Food that Makes You Feel Bad
The food we eat not only impacts our physical health, but it also plays a huge role in our mental health. The food we eat literally fuels our bodies and brains. That means if you aren’t getting enough of the right nutrients, your brain may not be able to produce the chemicals you need to feel your best.
It is thought that overconsuming the following foods may increase the severity of feelings of depression:
- Fast food
- Processed food
- Refined grains
- Refined sugar
- Artificial sweetener
- Salt
- Alcohol
- Energy drinks
- Dairy (especially if you are lactose intolerant)
- Gluten (especially if you have a gluten intolerance or sensitivity)
If you are constantly unhappy, paying attention to how often you eat the foods in this list may help you understand what changes you need to make. But remember, the key to making sustainable change is moderation. Cutting out these foods altogether will likely not make you feel better, and may even make you feel worse. (Salt, for example, is key for your body to run properly!)
Cut back where you can, and pay attention to how you feel after consuming these foods to find what feels best for you.
How to Get Happy: Eating certain foods can also make you feel better. Try adding in more of the foods below to see if your mood lightens:
- Fruits
- Vegetables
- High-fiber foods
- Fish
- Nuts
- Tofu
- Beans
- Unsweetened tea
- Black (or unsweetened) coffee
- Dark chocolate
Find Your Happiness
How you spend your time is how you live your life. So it pays to take a careful look at what you fill your days with if you are constantly unhappy. If you are looking for more ways to change your life for the better, check out my book Life Hacks: Simple Steps to a Healthier Life.
If you liked this article, please consider giving it a clap and following @wellnessmadeeasy on Medium for more simple ways to improve your life.
And one last thing. If making changes feels overwhelming, or if nothing you do seems to help lift feelings of unhappiness, please reach out to a mental health professional to get the support you need.
